The City of Lost Fortunes Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Three

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Four

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Part Five

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part Six

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Part Seven

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Read More from John Joseph Adams Books

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2018 by Bryan Camp

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Camp, Bryan, author.

  Title: The city of lost fortunes / Bryan Camp.

  Description: Boston : John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. | Series: A Crescent City novel

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017054025 (print) | LCCN 2017045346 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328810816 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328810793 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: New Orleans (La.) — Fiction. | Psychic ability — Fiction. |Magic — Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Contemporary. | FICTION /Fantasy / Urban Life. | FICTION / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends &Mythology. | FICTION / Fantasy / General. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.A4557 (print) | LCC PS3603.A4557 C58 2018 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6 –dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054025

  Cover design by Will Staehle/Unusual Co.

  Cover image © Mallory Fandal / Shutterstock (sky)

  Author photograph © Zack Smith

  Illustrations: The Magician licensed from Jeffrey Thompson/Shutterstock. The Hermit, Wheel of Fortune, The Hanged Man, The Fool, and Judgment licensed from Jeffrey Thompson/Cutcaster.

  v1.0318

  To New Orleans, my city; and to Beth Anne, my home

  Part One

  Chapter One

  In the beginning, there was the Word, and the Void, and Ice in the North and Fire in the South, and the Great Waters. A universe created in a day and a night, or billions of years, or seven days, or a cycle of creations and destructions. The waters were made to recede to reveal the land, or the land was formed from the coils of a serpent, or half of a slain ocean goddess, or the flesh and bones and skull of a giant, or a broken egg. Or an island of curdled salt appeared when the sea was churned by a spear. Or the land was carried up to the surface of the waters by a water beetle, or a muskrat, or a turtle, or two water loons. However the world was made, it teemed with life; populated by beings who evolved from a single cell, or who were molded from clay or carved out of wood or found trapped in a clam shell. They wandered up from their underworld of seven caves, or fell through a hole in the sky, or they crawled out of the insect world that lies below. All of these stories, these beginnings, are true, and yet none of them are the absolute truth; they are simultaneous in spite of paradox. The world is a house built from contradictory blueprints, less a story than it is a conversation. But it is not a world without complications. Not without conflicts. Not without seams.

  One of those complications was a man named Jude Dubuisson, flesh and blood and divine all at once, who stared out at Jackson Square, at the broad white expanse of St. Louis Cathedral, at the plump, fluttering mass of pigeons, at the tidal ebb and flow of tourists on the cobblestones, and saw none of it. He was likewise deaf to his surroundings: the constant mutter of the crowd, the hooves clopping on pavement, and the hooting echo of the steamboat’s calliope coming from the river. His attention was fixed inward, on thoughts of the old life he’d done his best to forget. All those years of standing between the worlds of gods and men, of the living and the dead.

  For his entire adult life, he’d straddled the seam between two worlds and brought trouble to both: a walking, breathing conflict with a fuck-you grin. That had been before the storm, though. Those memories belonged to a different man. In the six years since those fateful days in 2005, he’d tried to put it all behind him. Tried to ignore all the impossible things he knew. But the last few days, the past was like a storm cloud on the horizon, a rumble of thunder that refused to stay silent, a gloom that refused to disperse.

  The past just refused to stay dead.

  Jude was what the more liberal-minded in the city these days—those for whom the term “mixed race” sounded somehow offensive—would call “Creole,” and what older black folks referred to as “red-boned,” some indeterminate mix of white and African heritages along with whatever else had made it into the gumbo. All Jude knew was that he had light brown skin, a white mother, and a father he’d never met. The rest of the world always seemed more concerned about his ethnicity than he was.

  He kept his hair shaved close to his scalp and a scruff of beard that was more stubble than style. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved dress shirt despite the cloying wet shroud that clung to New Orleans in the summer, the heat that made any act an effort, even breathing. The damp shirt pressed tight against his skin, the sweat tickling down the small of his back. Jude reached up, absently, to wipe off his face with the handkerchief his mother had taught him a gentleman always carries, but stopped himself, pulled from his introspection by the self-conscious awareness of the leather gloves he had on. He tucked his hand back into his lap, out of sight.

  Not that anyone paid him any attention. He’d been out on the corner right across from Muriel’s since early that morning, had set up folding chairs and his rickety-ass table, laid out a chalkboard sign, a cash box, and a battered paperback atlas the same as he did most days, but in all the hours he’d been in the Square, only a few people had bothered to ask what the sign meant. None sat down. His services, unlike the tarot card readers and the brass bands and the art dealers, weren’t part of the cliché of the Quarter, and thus flew under the average tourist’s radar.

  But today the lack of clients suited his mood. He’d have found it hard to feign interest in anyone’s problems with the way his thoughts had been circling nonstop. Pacing back and forth, as tense and feckless as an expectant father. Or a criminal awaiting execution.

  A young street performer—Timmy? Tommy? Jude could never remember—stopped in front of Jude’s table, casting a long shadow. Jude frowned at the intrusion into his thoughts, even as he appreciated the shade. The white kid’s face, streaked with the sweaty remnants of clown paint, was split by an unguarded grin. He wore a golf cap and a tweed vest with no shirt on underneath. Less than ten years separated the two men, maybe as little as five, but to Jude’s eyes he was just a boy.

  Grown more used to silence than speech, Jude had to search for his voice before he could speak. “You need something?” he a
sked, the words scratchy.

  “About to ask you the same thing,” the boy said, pulling off the cap and swiping sweat from his forehead. “Headed to the grocery ’round the corner.” He gestured with the limp hat in the store’s direction before slipping it back onto his head.

  Jude shook his head. “Thanks anyway.”

  “Ain’t nothin’,” he said. He turned to go, then looked back. “You coming tomorrow night?” Jude shrugged and raised his eyebrows. The boy threw his hands into the air. “I only told you, like, twelve times already. My band finally got that gig? At the Circle Bar?”

  “Oh, right,” Jude said. He imagined being crammed into a tight space with a crowd of strangers and lied to the kid. “Yeah, I’ll try to make it.”

  The boy’s grin widened into a smile that took another five years off his age and made Jude feel like an older, more cynical version of himself. Tommy moved on to the next table, the sole of one of his shoes flapping, pitiful, on the street.

  Jude sighed, inhaling the rich odor of the Quarter: stale beer and musky humanity and the moist, dark scent of the river. It was hard to live as he did, hidden in the seams between the life he had known and this new life he wore like a mask, but—because of those things he tried not to think about—Jude belonged there.

  Or so he believed.

  A short while later, Jude got his first and only customers of the day, a couple of out-of-towners. College kids, judging by the Greek letters on their T-shirts and the bright green plastic drink cups in their hands. She was a white girl who had spent hours in the sun darkening her skin, and he was vaguely West Asian, but spoke with a tap-water American accent. Lovers, Jude guessed, from the way the boy rested his hand on her shoulder, and the way the girl introduced the both of them—Mandy and Dave—like the conjunction made them a single unit. The girl seemed by far the more eager of the two. When she asked Jude what his sign meant, Dave looked toward the other side of the Square, as if searching for an escape.

  “It means what it says,” Jude said. “If you’ve lost something, I can tell you where it is.”

  “Like, anything?” Mandy asked, glancing at Dave to see if he was listening.

  “Yeah,” Jude said, “like, anything.” She seemed not to notice the droll mockery in his voice, but Dave turned and frowned at her.

  “It’s a scam,” Dave said.

  “First try is free if you’re not satisfied,” Jude said. “Ten bucks if you are.”

  Dave’s frown deepened, but Mandy lowered herself into one of the aluminum chairs across from Jude. “Come on, sweetie, let me at least try it. Mom’ll kill me if she finds out—” She turned a sly glance in Jude’s direction. “If she finds out I lost what I lost.” Dave made an incredulous sound in the back of his throat and checked the time on his phone, doing everything but tapping his foot to signal his impatience. His every gesture told Jude he’d been hustled before.

  But Jude was no hustler, at least not today. He’d always had an affinity for lost things. Even as a child, he could point out that a friend had left a toy beneath a sofa cushion, could lead a neighbor to where her cat had stranded itself too high in a tree.

  This magic was the one true gift Jude had ever gotten from the father he’d never known. As he aged, or with practice—Jude wasn’t sure which—this affinity strengthened, grew more nuanced. A brush of his fingertips against a hair left on a pillow and he knew the lost child’s name, knew that she was hungry and cold and alone, knew that she was locked in a basement in Ohio, even though she’d only vanished from her room a few days before.

  The more complex the loss, though, the more cryptic his gift became. Sometimes deciphering the sensations and visions was impossible. Some things wanted to stay lost. But far more often than not, his magic worked. This power had lived at the core of him, became the foundation he’d built his life upon. He’d always been the man who could find things.

  Then came the hurricane, and a rip at the seams.

  The seam split between a government and its citizens when the levees that were built to protect . . . didn’t. It split between the people of New Orleans and their lives, the lucky ones cast out like dandelion seeds thrown by a fierce wind. The stitches that held together communities and families and homes strained in that wind. Some frayed, some tore. In the flood of lost things that followed, the space inside of Jude where his magic lived ripped open wide.

  In the aftermath, Jude found his power had become a raw, unhealing wound. Something fundamental about his gift had changed, had turned on him. Before, he’d had to focus, to reach for the knowledge his magic could give him. After, he could barely hold it at bay. Like many after the storm, he’d done what he could to numb his senses to all the loss around him. Booze, sex, any number of bad decisions. It worked, but only for a while. His power was too much a part of him to be denied. Eventually, he’d figured out that if he didn’t touch anything or anyone—hence the gloves—and if he released a trickle of his magic every few days, he could manage, just barely, to stay sane. For six years he’d survived, though he couldn’t really call it living, not going back to his old life, unable to move on to anything new, each day nearly identical to the one before. He’d tucked himself quietly away in the seams, like a coin lost beneath the sofa cushions. Being nowhere and nothing, he’d decided, was better than feeling all that loss.

  Jude slipped off his glove beneath the table and a rush of sensation flickered along his naked skin, like the pins and needles of returning circulation. He reached out and took the girl’s slender hand in his own, focusing on the single item she sought. If he had merely touched her, he would have seen and felt everything she’d lost in her young life. Even a seemingly happy and pampered girl like her would have lost enough to exhaust him.

  “Your mother’s earrings are in your hotel room,” Jude said.

  Dave let out a sharp, bitter laugh. “Good guess, Sherlock,” he said. “Real big leap to see that we’re tourists. Do people really fall for this?”

  Jude’s first instinct was to tell Dave just how far up his patronizing ass he could put his attitude, but he held his tongue for Mandy’s sake. She was a good kid. That wasn’t just a first impression; Jude knew she was, could feel it through her skin. “Not where you’re staying in New Orleans,” Jude said. He flipped through the atlas with his free hand, opening it to the Louisiana section, flipping to the map of Baton Rouge, and dropping his finger onto a street intersection without looking. “Were you here at any point in the last few days?” Mandy gasped and pulled her hand away. Jude fought the urge to smile. He’d phrased the last part as a question, but he’d known he was right. He knew more, the name of the hotel, the room number, that the two of them had snuck away from a church youth group–sponsored protest at the Capitol Building for a day of sin in the Crescent City, but he’d learned that if he got too specific, people went from intrigued to scared. Dave took a ten out of his wallet and sat down.

  “The next one is twenty,” Jude said.

  Fifteen minutes and fifty dollars later, Jude said something dubious and vague enough that Dave’s cynicism returned, and they left. Jude could have kept them there all night, parceling out the answers to the little mysteries of their little lives until their cash ran out, but the money meant nothing to him. This petty game with the tourists was all about the release valve for his gift.

  He’d been so much more than this, once.

  Later, as he started to pack up his belongings, he saw that Mandy had left her phone behind. It looked more like a child’s toy than a piece of technology: a pink flip phone covered in rhinestones. If only she knew someone who could find lost things, he thought, smiling for what felt like the first time in days. As soon as he picked it up, as if bidden by his touch, the phone jumped and buzzed. Jude snatched it open, startled. An incoming text from an unknown number.

  Meet me for a drink in an hour, the message said. The usual place, very important. Have something for you. Then, as he read, the phone twitched with another message. It rea
d, This is Regal.

  Jude started to type a reply, but sighed and snapped it closed instead. Regal wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  An hour to make it Uptown. He could get there easily if he had a car—or a driver’s license, for that matter—but he didn’t. He dismissed the idea of a cab, as well. If the streetcar didn’t get him there in time, Regal could wait. Or she wouldn’t, and that would be fine, too. It wasn’t like he actually wanted to see her.

  On his way out of the Quarter, he dropped the fifty dollars he’d skimmed from Mandy and Dave into the upturned hat of three kids tap-dancing on the corner. He could tell himself that meeting Regal was only professional curiosity, that he was only going to find out what magic she’d used to find him through a stranger’s phone, but he knew the truth. What gnawed at him was the more basic question of her reaching out to him at all. What could be so important that she’d track him down? What could she have for him that she wouldn’t have given him years ago? Was this why the past had been churning around in his mind lately?

  Of all the things that had been lost in this city, why had she bothered to find him?

  Walking into St. Joe’s bar was like descending into a cave and discovering a chapel. The shock of the colder air made Jude’s skin prickle and every hair stand on end. Dozens of crosses hung from the ceiling, not one of them resembling the next, one simple and carved out of wood, another an ornate twisting of wrought iron. The dusty scent of years of cigarette smoke and the sweet, green odor of fresh-cut mint leaves filled the tight space, coating the worn church pews and the high bar and the mirrors on the walls, dull in the dim light. Across the pool table in the back of the room, a dark hallway led past an ancient, churning ice machine and the toilets and out to a small patio. Speakers in high corners played a Rebirth song, sharp bursts of brass instruments at a frantic, exuberant beat. The whole front of the bar had been a plate-glass window once, but plywood covered it now. Boarded up since the storm.